Mission accomplished: Stanford becomes a haven for LDS players

( Left to Right) Stanford football players Dallas Lloyd, Brandon Fanaika, Sean Barton and Lane Veach pose for a photo after football practice on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2016 in Stanford, Calif.

Photo: Tony Avelar, Special to The Chronicle

A key chain changed Lane Veach’s life.

The Stanford linebacker was walking down a hallway in his dorm two years ago when the then-freshman was stopped by teammate Brandon Fanaika.

“Are you Mormon?” Fanaika asked, pointing to Veach’s Brigham Young University key chain. BYU is owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a religion also known as LDS or Mormonism.

Veach explained he was not, but his LDS girlfriend was a cheerleader at BYU. Fanaika, who had just returned from a two-year mission in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., invited Veach to attend church with him.

Fanaika’s timing was near-perfect. Veach was feeling overwhelmed with the demands of his Division I student-athlete life at and was looking for an answer to his stress. In a moment of homesickness, he had picked up a copy of the Book of Mormon — a gift from his girlfriend that had lain unopened for two years.

Veach said he felt an immediate sense of calm and wanted to know more about what he was feeling. Not long after, Fanaika asked him about his key chain. Veach was baptized in November of that year.

Stanford football players who are members of the Mormon church: safety Dallas Lloyd, guard Brandon Fanaika and Sean Barton and Lane Veach, both linebackers.

Photo: Tony Avelar, Special to The Chronicle

“There’s a pretty large community of LDS members out in Arizona where I live,” Veach, now a junior, said. “I always kind of gravitated toward those types of people — good, faithful people — whether I knew it or not.”

The fact that a Mormon conversion took place on a secular college campus in the middle of Silicon Valley might seem surprising. There was a time in 1970 when Stanford refused to schedule games against BYU in protest of what some considered the university’s institutional racism. Today, the Cardinal football team has three returned missionaries on its roster, with another four set to join by 2018.

How did a Mormon football community spring up in Palo Alto — 800 miles from the LDS capital of Provo, Utah?

The answer is Lance Anderson, Stanford’s defensive coordinator and also a returned Mormon missionary. Anderson is one of the nation’s top recruiters, and his recruiting area includes the heavily LDS areas of Utah and Arizona.

“A lot of Stanford sells itself,” Anderson said. “Especially in recent years with what we’ve been able to accomplish, that sells itself, too. ... We’re looking for the best players nationwide wherever we can find them. It kind of just worked out.”

Stanford has somewhat stolen the spotlight from BYU and Utah when it comes to recruiting LDS high school football players. Mormon missionaries had played before for the Cardinal, but since Anderson arrived on the scene in 2007, they’ve become more plentiful.

Mission accomplished: Stanford becomes a haven for LDS...

2of 3Stanford offensive guard Brandon Fanaika runs through some drills during football practice in Stanford, Calif., Thursday, Aug. 11, 2016.Photo: Tony Avelar, Special to The Chronicle

3of 3Stanford safety Dallas Lloyd (29) runs through some drills during football practice in Stanford, Calif., Thursday, Aug. 11, 2016.Photo: Tony Avelar, Special to The Chronicle

“I went on my mission, came home and was the one and only Mormon kid on the team,’’ said safety Dallas Lloyd, who arrived in 2012. “One of my favorite parts about coming here was the fact that our locker room is so tight, regardless of where you’re from, what you believe, what you don’t believe, the color of your skin — none of that matters.”

Two factors made Lloyd’s commitment to Stanford rare: his Mormon faith and his dedication to going on a mission.

BYU’s college environment is more inclusive and conducive to Mormon practices, which include not drinking alcohol, coffee and tea, among other forms of abstinence. Students at BYU are required to take religion classes and study the Book of Mormon. They are also bound by an honor code that follows the mission of the church.

Football programs like BYU and Utah are additionally used to enrolling returned missionaries, who are two years older than the standard college freshman, but also two years removed from the rigorous training and football focus it takes to succeed at top programs. Stanford is used to welcoming 18-year-old freshmen fresh out of high school competition.

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“It’s just no matter what you do, being away from the game for two years, it’s a little hard to get back into it,” Anderson said. “Things change over two years. You’re busy doing other things on a mission.”

Lloyd rewrote the script, which he says he’s proud of. He’s also living proof of some of the benefits that stem from recruiting Mormon missionaries.

“I take pride in the fact that our coaches have seen how I turned out, and so they realized, ‘Hey you know, it’s not a bad idea to recruit these kids,’” Lloyd said. “They’re not gonna decommit from us while they’re on their mission and go elsewhere. They’re gonna stay loyal to their word, and they’re bigger, they’re older, they’re more mature.”

Redshirt sophomore Fanaika, fifth-year senior Lloyd and redshirt freshman Sean Barton all went on two-year missions. The Mormon church sent Lloyd to Chile and Barton to the West African countries of Benin and Togo. Fanaika went to Florida.

“It was a big change coming back,” Barton said. “I was in West Africa, so first coming back to America, I was home in Utah for a couple months, and that was kind of a big change. Then coming out here again and getting back into football was pretty hard. And school as well — it all kind of hits you at once. It was a lot, but once you get past that and get settled back into things, I love it here.”

Veach also noticed a big change following his conversion, settling into Stanford and beginning to feel more at home. The redshirt sophomore married his high school sweetheart, the one who gave him his first Book of Mormon. His freshman-year anxiety and homesickness has been replaced by a strong sense of community, both within the Stanford football team and beyond.

“The feeling that I had whenever I was at church and when I was with all the people in the church around this community, it really just felt like home to me,” Veach said.